Tricky turns the difficult stuff into sound rather than sermon, and the result is an album that feels less like an elegy than a deeply lived affirmation of being here. No, not a return to form. The form was never abandoned. Instead, a deeply resonant expression of a singular experience eventually known finally by all. Alpha to Omega.
A sonic symbol for the game of life
Actual legend Tricky has been on my radar since Massive Attack’s Blue Lines days, from “Karmacoma” and his forever-faultless first album Maxinquaye. I bought the digipack singles “Ponderosa” and “Aftermath,” and fell deeply for Alex Reece’s remix of “Brand New Retro.” To have his thirty-years-later work, Different When It’s Silent, on my figurative desk to write a commentary on is a foundationally humbling notion.
Let’s be clear: there are no airs and graces about this new set of emotionally resonant tracks, and as a result, expect no airs and graces from this attempt to put into words a profoundly touched and cosmically imbibed album as Tricky presents here.
From the outset there is a cornerstone of authenticity that I’m not sure Tricky could avoid for all the money in the world. If heart-on-the-sleeve were a creative pulse—and it often is, and if I had my way always would be—then this album, and its purveyor, Tricky, are the embodiment of that same intention.
Even if a person were not an artist and were merely a voyeur of any form of art, authenticity would be the facet they would recognize without necessarily knowing they were in its presence. Authenticity is the key to reaching into the place within an audience member that an artist desires to touch: the artist channels the piece they are working on by paying attention to the creative pulse as it moves through them. That symmetry, that resonance, is beyond the control of artist and audience. But when it is channeled to the degree to which it is here, the creative piece simply appears. This notion should not undermine the capacity to pay attention to the creative whorl as it passes through the creator of the work.
With the intent of a fractured but reassembled vase for life, Tricky neatly assembles, in simple terms, a group of local and distant cohorts, and a rudimentary application of post-rock, trip-hop beats, rhymes and loves for life—either here or there—forming perhaps the most cohesive fractured, broken and complete incompleteness: a sonic symbol for the game of life.
A neat hybridization of acoustic and sampled work ::
Vocal duties are shared between Mitch Saunders’ beautiful falsetto, Run Red Rambo’s tight bars, Radana’s gravitas, False Idol’s own Marta Zlakowska, and Tricky himself. The musical palette is a neat hybridization of acoustic and sampled work. Throbbing bass pulses across tribal tom rhythms; atmospheres and tones are melancholic, adding to that same emotional heft. Moods move between optimism and broken-heartedness: crying to be seen and pleading to be heard wrestle alongside hope for the future and the feeling of being alive after retreating for an undisclosed time. After all, no one is immune to life, right?
In places such as “Be Still in the Pain,” there is self-aware anger against loss and presence. On the frankly astounding “Piano,” choral laments parry against Mitch’s tender lament. “Marinade”—string quartet and Tricky’s vocal musing—paints a wonderful canvas for realness personified. And Marta’s appearance on closing track “Out of Place” is frankly stunning.
In the end, it’s an open heart that opens the heart. It’s delightfully real. And Tricky’s paean to his daughter carries a weight that makes the whole record feel suddenly more human, more fragile. There is something profoundly moving in hearing someone arrive at that place where love, absence and mortality occupy the same space—where the knowledge that nothing and no one can be held onto forever becomes not an abstraction, but something lived and felt. Yet the album doesn’t dwell there. Instead, that awareness seems to feed back into the music itself: the warmth of the acoustic elements, the bruised electronics, the fractured rhythms, the choral textures and those beautifully human voices all become part of the same emotional vocabulary.
Mortality is present, certainly, but so is life in all its messy, sensual, rhythmic immediacy. Tricky turns the difficult stuff into sound rather than sermon, and the result is an album that feels less like an elegy than a deeply lived affirmation of being here. No, not a return to form. The form was never abandoned. Instead, a deeply resonant expression of a singular experience eventually known finally by all. Alpha to Omega.
Different When It’s Silent is available on False Idols. [Bandcamp]
